Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone

For her new and most radical album "Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone", Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming—almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.

Martina Bertoni returns to Karlrecords with "Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone," her most radical album yet. The foundation for the four electroacoustic pieces was laid during a residency at Stockholm's legendary Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) that the Berlin-based cellist and composer used to explore the curious instrument, originally designed by Halldór Úlfarsson in 2008, as an algorithmic system in order to examine tunings and the mathematical relationships between harmonic frequencies. Aiming to analyse and understand their interaction beyond the composer's control, Bertoni sought to engage more deeply with the concepts of time, tuning, and, most importantly, control. Accordingly, her four "Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone" seem both massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming—almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.

While the halldorophone—famously used by Hildur Guðnadóttir for her "Joker" score—roughly resembles a cello and can be played like one, it is an electronic instrument. The vibration of its strings is being picked up, amplified, and then routed through a speaker. This creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly complex depending on how much gain is added to individual strings. Úlfarsson gave Bertoni a carte blanche for how to handle the instrument, but she stresses that she relied on "minimal interventions—some string strumming and plucking" that set the interactions of different sounds and frequencies into motion. "I decided to not approach it like a cellist would," she explains. "Instead I used it as a kind of generative organ by turning it into a feedback machine, with tuned feedback triggering more feedback depending on the tuning, which was based on tetraphonic scales that I could apply on the four main strings as well as the sympathetic group of strings."

Bertoni recorded the material in the EMS studio, later composing and arranging the four complex pieces in her home in Berlin, after which they were mixed and mastered by Ciaran O'Shea. While this can be considered a compositional abstraction process, traces of her concrete work as a performer are firmly ingrained in the music. "The halldorophone doesn't have a line output, just a double set of speakers, which is why I recorded all sounds with two microphones in the EMS studio," she explains. "That's why there's plenty of breathing sounds here and there—label owner Thomas Herbst and I jokingly refer to the album as my 'chamber music record'." And indeed, there is a striking sense of intimacy to these four pieces throughout which individual sounds, harmonic frequencies, and even subtle rhythmic figures seem to move both on their own accord but also according to a underlying vision that steers their interplay.

Indeed, "Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone" is an album built on and marked by contrasts. The soothing polylogue of single sounds in the higher register on opener "Omen in G" is counterpointed by massive bass drones, while the second piece, "Nominal in D," plays a cunning game of repetition and difference by combining thick textures with all kinds of rhythmic elements. "Fades in C"—the longest of the four pieces, clocking in at 17 minutes—unlocks the emotional potentials of the sonic qualities of the halldorophone, sounding at once serene and anthemic, and "Organon in D" closes the album by underscoring how Bertoni's unconventional approach allows her to seamlessly transform simple, quiet tones into complex, towering walls of sound.

Credits:

Halldorophone recorded at EMS Stockholm in November 2023

All music recorded, composed and produced by Martina Bertoni

Mixed and mastered by Ciaran O'Shea

Lacquer cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M, Berlin

Cover Artwork by Gregory Cowling / Praxis Typography